Lent in Our Home

Good friend e-mailed last night and asked what Lent looks like in our home, and I realized I hadn’t gotten around to putting our plans here. And since putting stuff here helps us with accountability….

what we do, or at least try to do, in no particular order:

– purple tablecloth at the dinner table
– grapevine wreath on the cocktail table
– little wreaths for the kids, spiked with toothpicks — the kids (and this year, mom too) take out the toothpicks and replace with flowers — the thorns/toothpicks=our sins; the flowers = reparation, sacrifice, mortification, growth in virtue; so by Easter hopefully puro flowers na
– reading/discussing/small activities/crafts for lenten season saints, like st. valentine
– daily Mass, though we’ve been failing lately esp. with the cold front and me getting sick, we’ll start back again on Monday
– daily Rosary
– stations of the cross every Friday, usually at home, with “homemade” stations (coloring activity from 2004, “housed” in popsicle stick frames) — we also use the prayers from the Fourniers’ book, which we cut out and laminated
– meditative readings for kids and adults (i’m using In Conversation with God, and we’re trying to reread Hidden Power of Kindness, Bong got a booklet of meditations at church last weekend so he’s following that)
– major purging of rooms/closets for donations/getting rid of “stuff”
– trying to practice silence (my major failing) at home, trying to keep peace and harmony at all times (ha! we wish)
– if aisa feels like it this year we might do some pysanky (ukrainian easter eggs) — she took a pysanky class a few years ago and taught us how — i’d love to learn how to make this
– aisa sings at choir, so Holy Week there’s Tenebrae, then the Triduum…. somehow we didn’t have these in BF at our parish — what a loss.
– mostly we follow suggestions in the book by the Fourniers — samples here: Domestic Church + Catholic Culture + Catholic Mom; we don’t try to do EVERYTHING, but try to add one or two things every year.
– I also printed out new rosary and stations of the Cross cards from Kathryn’s website
– and a Lenten calendar from Julie — the pages say “2007”, but they’re downloadable, editable pages, so all you’ll have to do is change dates and the year. An awesome resource!